 Essex Farm, August 1937 |
Triadelphia
Triadelphia was a small town on the Patuxent River near Sandy Spring in Montgomery County on the Howard County border. It was founded in 1809 by "three brothers" (that is, brothers-in-law) Caleb Bentley, Thomas Moore, and Isaac Briggs. Thomas Hyatt Lansdale was an early resident. He and his son, Thomas Franklin Lansdale, milled cotton there until the Civil War. Triadelphia, and the Lansdales, are visible on the 1879 property map of Montgomery County, in the north-eastern corner of the Mechanicsville District. The Lansdales lived there until 1890 when they moved to Davidsonville in Anne Arundel County. The town was flooded in the mid-1940s to make a dam.
The Sandy Spring Museum holds documents and images about the Lansdale and related families from the nineteenth century. You can find Triadelphia among its online exhibits.
Triadelphia: Brookeville's Failed Cotton Experiment, from the Maryland State Archives, gives an overview of the town's history and purpose.
Unknown, The Personal Recollections of a Lost Village, written in 1911 and published in The Religious Telescope in Dayton, Ohio.
R. Bentley Thomas, The Story of Triadelphia, Maryland, written in 1943, the year the reservoir flooded the old town site. This was published as an Appendix in Annals of Sandy Spring, vol. 5.
Alice Vedder Farquahar, Notes about the Triadelphia Bell, a brief note, with no date. The "Tom Lansdale" who signed the note at the bottom is (I believe) Thomas Franklin Lansdale, Jr., the son of the Tom Lansdale who is mentioned in the note. There is even a poem about it: "Told of a Bell."
Mary Charlotte Crook, "The Tale of Triadelphia, the Town Beneath the Lake," was published in The Montgomery County Story 33.3 (August, 1990): 117-128. It is freely available, with many other resources, on the Montgomery County History Center's website.
Grover Hinds, "Thomas Lansdale at Savage, Triadelphia, and Ellicot Mills," in The Legacy: Newsletter of the Howard County Historical Society 43.1 (Spring 2005): 6-7. This is a brief biography of Thomas Hyatt Lansdale.
The Montgomery County Planning Commission
includes local histories, one section of which is about the Patuxent district in the east of the county (scroll down, and click on section I of the map). The site also
includes an inventory and map of burial sites in the county.
Hyattstown
Hyattstown, on the northern border of Montgomery County, was founded in 1789 by Jesse Hyatt. According to the Maryland Historical Trust,
In 1794, Jesse Hyatt, a native of Frederick County, purchased from John Bordley of Kent County, 207 acres of land known as "The Principal", "Hard Struggle", and "Ivey Reach", lying along the great road and bordering Frederick and Montgomery Counties. In 1798, he laid out the town that bears his name, offering for sale 105 quarter-acre lots in a double row own each side of the highway. The deeds to all of the lots required in addition to the purchase price a perpetual annual ground rent fee. Hyatt himself was a well-to-do farmer who during his lifetime owned a number of slaves and at the time of his death in 1813 owned over 1,206 acres of land.
Henry Poole, the first to buy, built the town's earliest house in 1800 and became its first storekeeper. Jesse Hyatt's [half-nephews], Eli and Asa, also built houses in the town; Asa and his son-in-law Warner Welsh, were leading merchants. By 1804 there were six houses in the town. Hyattstown was incorporated by the State legislature in 1809, and by 1811 twelve houses had been built. By the mid-1820s the town had a storekeeper, a blacksmith, a carpenter, a tailor, and an innkeeper.”
Inventory Form for State Historic Sites Survey, Hyattstown Historic District. This is the section on the Historic District alone, written in 1977 by Michael F. Dwyer, which includes a history of the town’s origin and a timeline of events.. The full Eligibility Review Form by the Maryland Historical Trust, 125 pages long, includes separate evaluations and photographs of all of properties in the town.
Charlotte Mary Crook, “Hyattstown: A Roadside Town Preserved,” The Montgomery County Story 29.2, May 1986.This is publicly available, with many other resources, on the Montgomery County History Center's website.
The Montgomery County Planning Commission includes local histories, one section of which is about the northern part of the count (scroll down, and click on section II of the map). The site also includes an inventory and map of burial sites in the county.
Anthony Nardo, “Ralph Norwood Sr. of Hyattstown: Framing a Family via Court and Land Records,” Maryland Genealogical Society Journal 62 (2021): 37-65, talks about one family who married into the Hyatts, Ralph Norwood and his wife Mary Ann Hyatt, a daughter of Eli Hyatt.